1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to network based access systems in which access is provided by activating links in files containing addresses, for instance in the manner of activating links embedded in files written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
2. Related Art
An increasing amount of information is becoming available on distributed communications systems. Most well-known perhaps is the World Wide Web (WWW) area of the Internet, accessed using WWW browsers. Pages consisting of text, graphics, audio files, video files etc. are each associated with an address in a distributed network by means of which they can be accessed. A review and tutorial on HTML, particularly its use in the Web environment of the Internet, is published in the paper entitled “Creating a Hypertext Markup Language Document for an Information Server” by JYM Chu, WL Palya and DE Walter in Behaviour Research Methods, Instruments and Computers, 1995, Vol 27(2), at pages 200-205.
Pages, usually of text, are displayed on a screen. At system startup, the page displayed will usually be provided by a user's browser. Navigation from a first page to a location elsewhere in the network is achieved by means of a link embedded in the first page and visible on screen. Usually, the link holds the address for the second location. When a user “clicks” on the link in the first page, the browser is activated to go to the location address held by the link. Thus the author of any page can make other pages, files or applications accessible regardless of their geographical location by links from their own page to relevant locations in the Internet.
(The term “page” as used herein should not be understood to refer only to pages of text and graphics but also to audio files, video files, Virtual Reality files and computer applications (software) that may be made available via systems such as the Internet and WWW, if the context so indicates.)
Current WWW browsers such as Netscape® use a click from a pointing device (for example a mouse) to select the links and thus to move between pages. That is, the device positions a cursor on the screen so as to identify a selected link. Although ‘point and click’ navigation is intuitive to people familiar with computer graphical user interfaces, this is not the case for a large proportion of the population. Furthermore there are many situations where a pointing device is not suitable for reasons of: cost, complexity, reliability, size, environment, etc.